LitStack Rec: Desperate Characters & The Last Days of Magic

Lauren AlwancloseAuthor: Lauren AlwanName: Lauren AlwanEmail: lauren@lmi.netSite:About: Lauren Alwan’s fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Southern Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and in the Bellevue Literary Review as the recipient of the 2016 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction. Her essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Northwest Review of Books, Writer's Digest, and listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review. Follow her at @lauren_alwan.See Authors Posts (168)13 July, 2017LitStack Recs

Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox

This classic of literary fiction, first published in 1970, serves too as a classic example of a novel that was lost to readers, then found. In 1999, when this—and all Paula Fox’s adult novels—fell out of print, interest in the author and her work was almost single-handedly revived by Jonathan Franzen, who called Desperate Characters the “greatest realist novel of the postwar era.” Though it wasn’t the first such accolade to come along. When the book was reissued in 1980, Irving Howe compared it to other great short novels of the century, including Billy Budd and The Great Gatsby. Nearly two decades later, David Foster Wallace described the novel as a “towering landmark of postwar Realism…A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved.”

Fox, who died earlier this year, was the author of numerous novels for adults and children, as well as two memoirs. She lived in Brooklyn, and is perhaps best known for Desperate Characters, though her 2001 memoir, Borrowed Finery, was widely praised for its portrayal of the abandonment by her parents when she was a girl.

Thomas Mallon called Fox’s style “Dickensian” and “molecular,” comparing it to Nicholson Baker’s in the depth of its detail, and Desperate Characters is a classic example of the Fox style. The novel concerns a couple Sophie and Otto Bentwood, a childless, well-to-do couple who have renovated a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Their three-story home of polished floors and beautiful art and carpets and unique objects is surrounded by street crime, addicts, and feral cats. It’s one feral cat in particular that launches the action, when a sympathetic Sophie gives it a saucer of milk and is viciously scratched.

But it is Sophie’s determination to ignore the wound, even as it festers and grows worse, that drives the tension. Soon additional afflictions surface, as though the environment and the marriage and even the world the couple inhabits is similarly infected. As Fox writes, “Illnesses do their work secretly, their ravages are often hidden.”

The writing is nonpareil. Here’s Fox describing an ashtray: “On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef.” Or here, a party:

“Now it was like the labored conversation among guests at a late hour after there is nothing more to say, nothing but ashes in the fireplace, dishes in the sink, a chill in the room, a return to ordinary estrangement.”

Decades after it was first published, Desperate Characters continues to find readers—and deservedly so. What’s confounding is how this excellent book fell into obscurity in the first place.

Read the story about how Desperate Characters was reintroduced to a new generation of readers here.

—Lauren Alwan

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Written by Lauren AlwancloseAuthor: Lauren AlwanName: Lauren AlwanEmail: lauren@lmi.netSite:About: Lauren Alwan’s fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Southern Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and in the Bellevue Literary Review as the recipient of the 2016 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction. Her essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Northwest Review of Books, Writer's Digest, and listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review. Follow her at @lauren_alwan.See Authors Posts (168)

Lauren Alwan’s fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Southern Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and in the Bellevue Literary Review as the recipient of the 2016 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction. Her essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Northwest Review of Books, Writer's Digest, and listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review. Follow her at @lauren_alwan.

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On this day, November 16, in 1950, William Kent Krueger was born in Torrington, Wyoming. Author of the popular Cork O’Connor series of crime novels (16 books and counting), he knew he wanted to be a writer since the third grade, but life (and a rebellious streak in college) intervened. Instead, he made a living logging timber, digging ditches, working construction, and as a freelance journalist. It wasn’t until age 47 that his first novel (Iron Lake) was published and he hasn’t looked back since, winning numerous awards for his mystery and crime writing. He currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota; today he turns 68.